External Hard Drive Amiga 500

[occi]

Hi guys,

in another post someone suggested an ACA500+ as an external hard drive for my Amiga 500. I feel a little stupid for saying this but I don't think I found the correct item when searching for it. Could someone post a link to that hard drive so I can double check with what I found?

My technical expertise is maybe a 4 out of 10 so I am looking for a robust, simple and easy to use external hard drive.

Second question - how do I actually install games from the original disk onto the hard drive? I mean is there any dedicated "install" file on a disk or do you simply copy over the whole disk into a folder on the hard drive? Sorry for all the naive questions, it has been 30 years.

Thanks lads!

[intric8]

This is the device you're looking for, Occi.

There's actually quite a lot of information on that Shop page. But if you're looking for more, you can get a lot on its Wiki page.

[occi]

Thanks man, much appreciated. Looks affordable too!

[Zippy Zapp]

Just to chime in that I think you will love the ACA500+. It is an awesome device. You will need a couple of Compact Flash cards though.

Hopefully the shipping is more reasonable for you then it is to the USA right now. Seems the minimum is 43 Euros to the USA for anything you buy from iComp. Supposedly it is the shipping company that jacked up their rates. Pre-pandemic it was something like $9 US.

[vdereds]

I have seen the ACA500+ mentioned many times in various forums. But mostly these were topics from about the same year as this one. I don't argue, the information may still be relevant. But maybe someone can share their experience, how long can a disk with such characteristics work? Before that, I had a bad experience with RAID disks. More precisely, the bad experience was in trying to recover data from damaged disks. Local experts asked about some wild repair conditions, and miraculously I got to salvage data service. Now, when choosing a hard drive, I want to be sure that I won't have problems with it. And it will be able to meet all my performance requirements.

[McTrinsic]

My impression so far is that you dont need to worry about longevity of modern media when used in an Amiga.

The ACA500+ has install media for a basic OS3.1 setup. Really easy.

There are only few games with direct HDD installers. For the majority, you can use WHDLoad. There are packages out there which contain huge collections with games to be run using WHDLoad.

[A1-X1000]

My impression so far is that you dont need to worry about longevity of modern media when used in an Amiga.

The ACA500+ has install media for a basic OS3.1 setup. Really easy.

There are only few games with direct HDD installers. For the majority, you can use WHDLoad. There are packages out there which contain huge collections with games to be run using WHDLoad.

Have no issues running WHDLoad games other than the few that require 2MB chip that is. I highly recommend the ACA500+ for any Amiga 500 user as it's a solid hard drive solution with built in IDE port for transferring files from PC to Amiga and also has an accelerator board (can reach up to 42Mhz depending on your PSU) built in too & that's not including the built in Action Replay card

[McTrinsic]

To be picky - it’s a CF port where you also via adapter can use an SD.

Awesome for that.

Technically, it’s not a full atapi/IDE port

[A1-X1000]

@ McTrinsic

'technically' you're right ... it's just a cool awesome card for any Amiga 500 user be that total noob or Amiga old timer:D

[McTrinsic]

Hi A1-X1000,

totally agree with you!

The only reason to point this out is because there are some debugging tools that could turn the CF back into a pinrow to be used like an IDE. While you could attach Harddrives or even via adapter an SSD, you couldn’t use an optical drive on one such port.